Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the performance video Vitrina , María Teresa Hincapié stood inside a storefront window in downtown Bogota, unannounced, for eight hours a day, wearing a uniform and initially carrying out cleaning chores. As the day and passers went by, the routine became more playful: she would send kisses to bus drivers on the busy Avenida Jiménez who would return them, use the newspaper with which she was shining the glass to flirtatiously hide and engage with an improvised audience or draw the shape of her body with soap and a sponge. She would interrupt these chores to carry out other ‘feminine’ activities, like brushing her hair or applying make-up, only to return to frantically cleaning the transparent surface that separated her from the public.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In her new series titled Ninas Peruanas Cusquenas , Teresa Burga depicts young indigenous women from Peru’s Andean region, dressed in traditional garments. Sourcing imagery from the internet, the drawings recall an untitled series of drawings from 1974, in which Burga selected images of women at random from various print media, and then rendered the images on paper. Those drawings, like the newer ones, suggest the perils of images without context––how assumptions are made, stereotypes are formed, and knowledge is gathered.

Photography (Photography)

Stretching between San Pedro and the beach in Altata, Sinaloa, there is a 40 km road where there are three invisible borders controlled by rivalling armed groups. There is a price to pay for crossing these territories. This series of 21 photographs by Teresa Margolles, titled 40 Km , resemble snapshots of peaceful lands, but also bear witness to the reality lived by the local people in this area.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Untitled (Celestial Motors) is a visual meditation on an icon of modern urban Philippine life—the jeepney. This ubiquitous form of public transportation, originally built from U. S. military jeeps left on the islands after World War II, is normally exuberantly painted and personalized. They are known for their crowded seating and kitsch decorations, which have become an omnipresent symbol of Philippine culture.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The drawing “Heidegger’s Cabin” (2005) is inspired by Martin Heidegger’s essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” During the artist’s stay in a high alpine area, near a lake reservoir, Bussmann related the landscape in her surroundings to her reading of Heidegger’s terms on the work of art and the meaning of a “thing.” In attempt to link spiritual heights to natural heights, Bussmann metaphorically relates the subjects of being and truth to a hiking path, and its different degrees of challenge and risk. In the drawings rather than finding the optimal path to reach ultimate meaning and materialization, Bussmann never arrives at “Heidegger’s Cabin,” and instead is led off the beaten track to areas she never discovered before. Upon her return from the mountains in 2004 and 2005, she continued to develop the series, leading up to 20 drawings on handmade paper that attempt to problematize Heidegger’s theory on artworks as “things” as bearers of traits, “things” confronting the world of perception, and “things” as formed matter.

Painting (Painting)

Maria Taniguchi works across several media but is principally known for her long-running series of quasi-abstract paintings featuring a stylized brick wall device. Full of subtle gradations and low-key modulations, these are her trademark: a sustained, reiterative practice, steeped in repetition but carefully attuned to the economies and the sculptural presence of painting. Her approach to painting is conceptual.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico. I painted them sky blue, creating a “Hole in the Wall” This deconstruction of “feminized” work explores the difficulties in reconciling both low wages and undervalued work via social and political infrastructures, confronting issues of labor and power. The images that I myself perform, present a duality: women dressed in a black tango dance attire while engaging in de-skilled domestic chores; the surreal within non-fiction.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Territory is not for sale is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogotá on the tenuous verge of becoming urban. As an art object and installation, it comprises multiple stacks of paper each containing the decrees of land expropriation from many different peasant farmers who are being forced to sell their lots of land back to the government. Usme lies at the southern urban-rural border strategically located next to the Páramo de Sumapaz, an enormous neo-tropical tundra ecosystem and water reserve.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I’ve heard stories (2008) is one of Marwa Arsanios early works. It is a short animated film staging a story that took place at the Carlton hotel in Beirut. This work is the first part of a longer project on this iconic building.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Soft Materials is a curious, touching but also disturbing sequence of confrontations between two people: a man and a woman, and machines. Shot in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Zurich, the humans and the machines mirror each other’s actions. It is unclear which party takes the lead.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Na China” means “In China” in Igbo language. Marie Voignier’s film NA CHINA! focuses on the African women communities who have emigrated to Guangzhou, in the southeast of China.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Interested in role-play and videogames, Ana María Millán developed workshops with different communities in order to create characters and scenarios for her animations, often in collaboration with a choreographer. Elevación evokes various narratives inspired by the comicstrip Marquetalia, Raíces de la Resistencia (Marquetalia, Roots of the Resistance) (2011). This comic strip is a memoir of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerillas written by Jesús Santrich, one of its leaders who, after the 2016 Peace Agreement, rejoined dissident members of the organization in a clandestine guerrilla splinter group in 2019.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Real. Retrato de Norman Mejía. (The Real. A Portrait of Norman Mejía.)

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Drought Mask by Rajni Perera is a prototype that is suggestive of dire implications for human survival. Directly addressing the urgent climate crisis, specifically wide-spread drought, this sculpture imagines hybrid cultural aesthetics of the near-future after global collapse. Composed of various woven textiles complete with frills and fringes, leather, a gas mask, and pencil, Rajni’s mask prefigures future dystopian characters who are resilient and resourceful; self-fashioning tools for survival.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The three Maiko s were included in Ron Terada’s 2008 exhibition, Voight–Kampf , at Catriona Jeffries gallery. More ambitious in size and subject matter, this show with its complex video installation marked a new path for Terada’s work. Voight-Kampf is based on a scene from Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner in which a giant advertising billboard in the midst of a dystopian city of Los Angeles in the future displays a geisha eating candy.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In keeping with her mythological proclivity, Minotaur (2009) casts a new light on an old narrative. The film takes the ancient Greek story of the half-man, half-bull as its title subject, but at its core, Minotaur is an homage to pioneering modern dancer and choreographer, Anna Halprin. Along with Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer, Halprin’s fearless and lifelong dance practice paved the way for the evolution of modern and contemporary dance as we understand it today.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tourisme International was shot as the recording of a show on the scale of a country. In the urgency of perpetual travel, this tourist journey visits monuments, museums, institutions presented by North Korean guides whose voices we do not hear. Marie Voignier entirely redesigned the sound of each sequence in post-synchronization, making only the living experiences of footsteps and rustling of clothes audible, to create a new universe, disconnected from the official discourses.

Installation (Installation)

The installation Music Stands: Free Exercise 7, 8, and 9 by Marina Rosenfeld consists of music stand-like structures and a corresponding set of panels and acoustic devices that direct, focus, obstruct, reflect and project sound in the gallery. Together the components play on the connection between aural and social relations signified by the music stands. An episodic score emanates from the work’s sound system, momentarily interrupting the atmosphere with brief eruptions of electronic sounds and vocality.

Installation (Installation)

Carlton Hotel project is the second part of a research on the Carlton, an iconic building of modernist architecture from the 1960s in Beirut. Designed by Polish architect Karol Shayer, it was destroyed in 2008 (date of the project’s creation). This project is multifaceted, always transforming into different forms and involving a series of collaborations: the first step took place as part of the “traveling curtains project”, which consisted in recuperating the curtains from the Carlton hotel before its demolition and sending them to different cities throughout the world where they would be subject to new interventions and transformations by artists, among whom Marwa Arsanios.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Unraveling, or “unweaving” sections of fabric, Maria Fernanda Plata arrived at delicate and tenuous-looking forms, both ghostly and gentle. Her careful meditations in fabric reflect Plata’s ongoing interest in the relationship between people and their environments, in fragility, systems, and destruction.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Although typically sold today as a novelty item for flower arrangements and interior decorating flourishes, cotton can also be seen as a proxy, through synecdoche, for US slavery. Dead Zone (4) by Aria Dean presents a preserved blossom of that trade’s primary cash crop, cotton, crystalized in a state of non-decay whilst encased under protective glass. Hidden in the base of the work is a signal jammer which prevents mobile phones from broadcasting when nearby.

Painting (Painting)

In this untitled acrylic painting, Tessa Mars explores the long-lasting effects of colonialism on the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, particularly in terms of female vulnerability and resilience. Drawing on her interest in retelling stories of her native country, and confronting the past and the present, Mars portrays her cultural essence and heritage by imagining spiritual spaces that connect people and land across time. With a pictorial practice that highlights pastel colors, the divinisation of the figures on the canvas and the spiritual elements within the composition ultimately enhance the narrative of her Caribbean ancestry while conflating the distinctions between autobiographical and historical events.

Photography (Photography)

In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel. The long-exposure capture depicts García Torres at multiple stages of brainstorming, devising, and introspection, his ethereal figure connected with artistic giants of the past. Yet, there is also an insipid tone beyond mere insomnia or frustration at the lack of being able to garner inspiration.

Installation (Installation)

Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model. The work takes as its departure point the history of Wilmington, Ybarra’s native hometown in southern Los Angeles. The piece refers to a Civil War era ammunition store that Ybarra found at the heart of the harbor close to Long Beach.

Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films. Indeed rather surprisingly Kim seems to have had a huge collection of Western videos and he published a book called “On the art of the Cinema” in 1973. As the final acknowledgments indicate, Garcia Torres’s work was produced following in depth research, consulting information given by director Shin Sang-ok who has been kidnapped by Kim in 1978, as well as Jerrold Post (The George Washington University) and Timothy Savage (Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art. For him, this is a way of rethinking the tradition in a more personal way, to have a grip on events of recent history and examine them with a curiosity, both critical and sensual. The artist emphasizes the fact that new ideas and meanings may arise from these archaeological narratives.

September 2007

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969. This article, which is the only trace of his work, is indicative of a lack of interest by Neuestern to leave his name in history; to “defend an artistic activity that has little or no interest to last.” Oscar Neuestern could only remember the previous 24 hours, of which his life and his work are in constant erasure and reconstruction. His practice was “to let things be done with time and the unconscious,” while “not fearing the void.” He looked for the absolute through transparency and symmetry.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This still life falls apart, or rather floats apart as the composition is proved unstable and constantly morphing. An impossible attempt at achieving a fixed state, some objects remain buoyant and some objects sink, constantly tilting the overall scale and arrangement. Properties of weight, mass and shape have their own will but a hand appears in the scene, pushing back on these mysterious forces.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva traveled to Japan for a month to make a series of short 16mm films, often shot in slow-motion. This film, shown in continuous loop, has a run-time of just under 3 minutes, and is presented without sound. It captures a traditional Shisa (combination of a dog and lion from Okinawan mythology) animated by an invisible person.